On Jun 3, 2009, at 15:00 , Thomas Richardson wrote:
> PS Please forgive my ignorance, but when you say:
>>>> BTW: you may want to use something like pch=19, cex=0.1 (and maybe
>> add some alpha to get a quick density estimation).
>> I don't know what alpha refers to here.
>
alpha = alpha component of the color (100% = opaque, 0% =
transparent). Using alpha < 100% with pch=19 is a good way to get a
rough density estimation in cases where points overlap since the
overall opacity will increase with the number of overlapping points.
E.g., compare
plot(rnorm(1e5), rnorm(1e5), pch=19, cex=0.2)
to
plot(rnorm(1e5), rnorm(1e5), pch=19, col="#00000010", cex=0.2)
Varying the alpha will allow you to shift the focus from outliers to
global patterns.
Cheers,
Simon
>>>>> Cheers,
>> S
>>>>>>> So I guess it might be related to the
>>> "special treatment" of "." described on help(points) ??
>>> ---
>>> Value pch="." (equivalently pch = 46) is handled specially. It is
>>> a rectangle of
>>> side 0.01 inch (scaled by cex).
>>> ---
>>> I find this behaviour unnerving: the (resized) plots made it look
>>> as if there
>>> was a lot of structure in the data, but on closer inspection it
>>> turned out to be
>>> entirely a consequence of the quartz device and plot function!
>>> I can't imagine that this behaviour is intended - even if it were
>>> intended to
>>> suppress points (like some axis labels) - it seems strange that
>>> enlarging the
>>> window makes points disappear. (I also tried setting dpi=72 in
>>> quartz(), but
>>> this did not fix the problem).
>>> Thanks in advance.
>>> Thomas
>>> ------------------------------------------------------
>>> sessionInfo()
>>> R version 2.9.0 (2009-04-17)
>>> i386-apple-darwin8.11.1
>>> locale:
>>> en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8/C/C/en_US.UTF-8/en_US.UTF-8
>>> attached base packages:
>>> [1] stats graphics grDevices utils datasets methods base
>>> ______________________________________________
>>>R-devel at r-project.org mailing list
>>>https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel>>>>